Books

Joel Marks asks ‘New God or no God?’.

The story goes that while being processed for imprisonment, Bertrand Russell was filling out a form
that asked what his religion was. He wrote “atheist” (or perhaps “agnostic”),
whereupon the jailer remarked, “Isn’t it wonderful? We may belong to different religions,
but we all believe in the same one God.” This gave the philosopher a chuckle, but there may be
more truth to it than he supposed. More recently, theologian Karen Armstrong has argued in her book A
History of God (1993) that atheism is always a response to a particular notion of God. Since what
is meant by God differs from era to era, not to mention from culture to culture, denomination to denomination,
etc, atheism turns out to be an historically-conditioned concept. This means that today’s atheism
could be tomorrow’s theism.

Along comes philosopher Mitchell Silver’s new book A Plausible God, which tackles the
question of whether modern atheism is compatible with ‘the new God’ of some contemporary
theologians. The book focuses on the work of liberal Jewish thinkers, an accident of the author’s
own interests and commitments, but the arguments and conclusions are meant to be general. Still, Silver
is upfront – literally, in his opening chapter – about the problematic nature of his audience,
for, Jewish specificity aside, the book speaks to people who are already convinced atheists or else ‘new
theists’ – in a word, ‘moderns’. Moderns are those who, like Silver, fancy themselves
children of the Eighteenth-Century European Enlightenment: that is, devotees of rationality, science,
and liberal or progressive politics. Silver’s sanguine hope is that this includes an increasing
number of us, and his publisher, buttressed by (atheist) Daniel Dennett’s enthusiastic endorsement,
apparently agrees.

Until recently moderns would have been at best skeptical about matters religious, but Silver notes
the novel trend where some moderns hanker after tradition. Silver felt this tug himself in his previous
book, Respecting The Wicked Child: A Philosophy of Secular Jewish Identity and Education (1998),
wherein his response was to champion a sense of Jewish ethnic identity tailored to Enlightenment values
and hence shorn of supernaturalism, ie God. He admitted candidly that what had prompted his concern about
community was bringing children into the world. Now, a decade later, Silver again reveals a personal
motivation for his philosophical investigations, this time his genuine puzzlement about the alternative
route chosen by some of his peers, who also seek to enjoy the best of both worlds, modern and traditional,
but now with a God compatible with the findings of scientific rationalism. A Plausible God is
Silver’s effort to discover whether this makes any more sense than the jailer’s happy reverie
to Russell.

The inquiry is not just an intellectual exercise, for presumably what motivates new God faith, like
any faith, is some kind of felt need. Silver himself may have no such need, perhaps because he has the
Zen-like or existentialist capacity to bite the bullet of raw, difficult, occasionally pleasurable, finite,
ultimately pointless human existence – or simply because, as he himself offers, he is of a moderate
temperament that has “less of a thirst for heavenly joy and feel[s] less threatened by psychological
hell” (p.111) – and because he has never been in a foxhole. But the rest of us moderns
might be missing something essential to our thriving if we truly turned out backs on all that ‘the
God of our fathers’ provided. Much of Silver’s book is a survey of what that provision might
have been, and then it considers in detail whether the new God is a satisfactory substitute (for as always,
God is in the details).

The reader must keep in mind that Silver is not discussing whether God exists. It is a premise of
the book that the old God does not. Lest anyone need reminding of why such a belief is untenable, Silver
helpfully provides an appendix that reviews the main arguments for that God’s existence and their
refutations. As for belief in the new God, Silver grants that it is on equal epistemic footing with atheism,
but that is only because its empirical claims are coincident with the claims of science. Does this leave
enough wiggle room for a new God who can ‘satisfy’ the way the old God could? More precisely,
can the belief in such a God provide the sorts of solace, meaning and inspiration that a belief in
the old God did? For any benefits accorded by the actual existence of the old God have been
ruled out of court ex hypothesi: and any benefits accruing from the actual existence of the
new God would presumably also be available to the scientific atheist – except for those benefits
that depended specifically on believing in this God.

The first thing Silver must do is describe this new God for us, but that is a tricky task. As a scholarly
text, the book must be faithful to the theologians’ conceptions it seeks to assess. Since it is
a given that no two theologians (or scholars) are ever likely to agree perfectly, Silver must abstract
some essence that, ideally, will be acceptable to all of them. In fact Silver makes the much broader
claim on behalf of the new God that it shares its essence with some very old gods indeed, including the
Brahman of Hinduism and even the God of many Christian theologians, both heretical and mainstream. Another
challenge is that the new God must avoid both the Scylla of violating Enlightenment sensibilities and
the Charybdis of being so vapid as not to be worth the bother of believing in. The danger is that the
conception Silver settles upon might be a straw God; but he certainly makes a good-faith attempt to meet
all the criteria. The “baseline new God,” Silver concludes, is “whatever there is in
nature that makes good things possible” (p.42).

In the end, I think, the reader must decide for him/herself whether the set of qualities Silver identifies
as crucial to divinity are what would be minimally desired in a God. Then the issue becomes whether that God
is compatible with the modernist reader’s beliefs and values. Silver is frankly skeptical that
the new theologians have pulled this off. His central suspicion is that they trade on equivocation; that
is, when articulating the qualities of their God they explicitly toe the modernist line, but the very
act of calling this object of concern ‘God’ implicitly invokes the old God, with
all of His comforting associations. Silver himself, it seems clear, would rather be a “dissatisfied
infidel” than a “satisfied believer” (p.100, resonating of John Stuart Mill).

The Big Lie – adoption of a false belief in the old God because of its superior benefits – is
not an option. More to the point, neither is the small self-deception of a “useful obfuscation” (p.101),
which is what Silver sometimes suspects the new God to be. To be “clear and honest” (p.101)
is Silver’s modus operandi. Indeed, the reader will delight in the incisiveness and wit
of his arguments, no matter whether persuaded of Silver’s thesis or not. But there may also be
the lingering worry of whether the subject matter has been made to fit a Procrustean methodology. Is
there no Middle Way between rigid dogmatism and uncompromising skepticism? Silver also acknowledges that
his “innocence of [mystical states] surely contributes to a secularist bias,” since “mystics
seem inclined to theism” (p.xv).

Silver does make one major effort to accommodate his theist co-moderns by suggesting that in the end
it is all a matter of taste. In fact he becomes a regular Feyerabend of religion, extolling the prospect
of a diversity of beliefs – “a vision of free men and women” (p120). Here Silver explicitly
appropriates the unintended import of Russell’s joke: “Religious Truth, of which I take
atheism to be a species, is plural” (p.115, my emphasis). In doing so Silver also comes full
circle to his Jewish roots, for, as I once heard a rabbi declare, a Jew who does not believe in God is
still a Jew, since ‘Israel’ means ‘one who contends with God’, and that is surely
what an atheist does, “or something like it” (p.120).

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